LEAF WARDEN by MarkoPoloDev
Keeping your zen garden clean is a pain.
Good thing you have a giant laser.
Arrow keys to move. Space to rake. Hold space to charge your rake's giant laser.
The leaves on the ground are counted by the main progress bar. Too many leaves on the ground and you lose!
There's a timer after each wave of leaves; during this time no leaves will fall.
Careful! The more lasers you use, the less time you have between waves. You can recoup the time loss incurred by the laser by frying lots of leaves at once!
Tools
Post-submission Changelog (Fixes)
- time between game over and new game is now constant
- score no longer increases after game over
- fixed rake hitbox to be more consistent (it was flipping incorrectly)
- minor quality of life improvements - adjusted audio levels, menus make more sense, etc (full list of changes on github)
Ratings
| Overall | 171th | 3.677⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 323th | 3.333⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 113th | 3.683⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 158th | 3.839⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 134th | 3.855⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 42th | 3.903⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 150th | 3.34⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 143th | 3.483⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 36🗳️ | 26🗨️ |
Yeah, the ending is not coded very well, since the game uses leaf count to decide when to reset - I should have used a timer -_-
> It would be nice if there was some kind of tutorial
Agreed that it's not very intuitive, I wanted there to be a few scenes to explain things before the main game but ran out of time :cry:
Thanks for the feedback!
Thanks! I had a lot of fun making it and I'm glad one other person enjoyed it :D
I didn't realise bug fixes were allowed after the submission deadline, so I've fixed the game-over bug where the score keeps increasing.
On the tutorial, one time in LD I just made a static text in the corner of the screen that listed the controls, it worked pretty well! And it's not time consuming, so a tip for you for your future Ludum Daaaare endeavours!
> just wish the incoming wave didn’t brought so much lag :D
yeah, I would definitely want to switch to something more like an entity system for the leaves if I continued development.
> just make a static text in the corner of the screen that lists the controls
I will definitely keep that in mind! Thanks for hanging out in the stream!
@Elfcirynn
> I wish the raking was a little more satisfying
I am on a quest to make raking the most satisfying experience! Do you have ideas I could steal for improving it?
I definitely agree that the rake moves leaves inconsistently; I didn't understand until I saw @manbeardgames trying to play it! definitely needs a bigger hitbox / better leaf collision detection.
Like @elfcirynn said, sometimes it seemed that the rake wasn't pushing the leaves I thought it would be, maybe with the collision detection.
One last suggestion on the controls maybe would be to allow the player to choose the direction the rake sweeps in. Maybe set it up with the mouse, so you can move left and right using keyboard, and use left and right click on mouse to sweep in those directions.
> Maybe adding like a “zen” mode
Agreed, I kind of regret adding a lose condition now.
> maybe allow the player to choose the direction the rake sweeps in
Definitely on the post-jam feature list!
Maybe make it possible to change the rake's direction and rake the leaves out of view while the laser is just another option to get rid of the leaves quickly?
Maybe have some kind of cool down for the laser too?
> As a design/UI thing, I didn’t realize the bar at the top was how many leaves there were before you lost
Yeah, I definitely learned to rethink my definition of 'intuitive' this jam. I'm thinking a vertical bar on the side with a copy of the leaf sprite for an indicator that moves up and down and fades to red / starts shaking as it gets closer to game over.
> standardize the pixel size across assets
An artifact of my poor art skills =( Good call, I'll have to work on this.
@one-seed-fruit Glad you liked it! Thanks for the feedback!
> cool down for the laser
That is a good idea, although I think I'd have to find another way to get rid of leaves; sweeping them offscreen doesn't seem like it would be very satisfying. Maybe I'll add little tables you can sweep them under XD
Or maybe more sand, that disturbs that carefully drawn lines of the zen garden? :thinking:
> rake the fertilizer on to the tree in the middle to grow it better…
That's supposed to be a big carved rock, not a tree. TODO: learn to draw rocks :laughing:
> I had hard times distinguishing between the falling leaves and the ones on the ground
Good call. Not sure a color change is they way to go (might disrupt the mood?); I'll have to play around with it.
Thanks for the feedback!
> Good call. Not sure a color change is they way to go (might disrupt the mood?); I’ll have to play around with it.
Could maybe do a animation on the leaves that are falling, versus the ones on the ground being the static sprite.
I do wish there was a bit of a tutorial or at least the controls listed on the screen, I had a tough time at first figuring out what to do. I also got a bug at one point where I went off the screen in the bottom right corner and couldn't find my way back.